Swim Lessons: A Life in Pools
Splash
By Eric Bard/Corbis/Getty Images.
Tourists at Tahiti Motel Swimming Pool in Wildwood, New Jersey, 1965.
The new book The Swimming Pool in Photography captures the swimming pool in various forms around the world, and serves as a reminder that pool-hopping through a memory can outline a life.
As an American, swimming pools can seem so American. Blame the pool-friendly climates from sea to shining sea. Blame the Fourth of July. Blame Hollywood, which is good at claiming things for us. Blame Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Graduate, The Sandlot and its "pool honeys," The Big Lebowski, The Swimmer (the short story and the adaptation), this Terry O'Neil photo of Faye Dunaway by the pool with her Oscar, David Hockney's L.A. oeuvre, Palm Springs writ large on the shared imagination. You'd think Americans have a pool in every pot, and a jacuzzi in every garage.
But of course we don't have a monopoly on pools. Maybe it only feels that way because the water reflects us back at ourselves, or maybe the muted feeling underwater is a seasonal reminder of our subconscious. Yes, maybe it's Freudian. But The Swimming Pool in Photography, published by Hatje Cantz, captures the swimming pool in various forms around the world, in cities present and eras passed. It's a reminder that pool hopping through a memory can outline a life.
Synchronized backup swimmers practicing, 1960.
From NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images.
My first pool was like a lot people's first pools. You may have loved yours as much as I loved mine. The suburban pool. The pool of swim team and Fourth of July soda dives and "adult swim," which still seems like a well-intentioned, but largely useless concept (kids have to pause a game of Categories so adults can bob for a mere 10 minutes? Who's satisfied here?).
A swimming coach instructing the women's swim team through a pool side window at Bakersfield Junior College in California, July 1958.
By Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr taking a dip, 1964.
By John Loengard/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
An artificial beach inside the Ocean Dome in Miyazaki, Japan, 1996.
© Martin Parr/Magnum Photos.
Mine was known for its limeade poured over crushed ice, but if I was able to scrounge some dollars together, I ordered microwave pizza and a Crunch bar that I would let melt in its wrapper before tucking in. If I was invited to the country club down the road where the private-school kids went, I would order chicken tenders on someone's parents' tab. And then I was 12 years old, and I stopped buying both because I had bought a bikini.
There was the Y.M.C.A. pool the year I injured my leg from cross country and couldn't do much for exercise, but laps. As a 17-year-old trying to keep pace with the octogenarians, I became very familiar with the way bodies can let you down.
Exactly two high-school friends had pools in their backyards. One was in-ground and the other a giant blue bowl sitting on a lawn. Any pool is a luxury, whether situated in a backyard or divided among a whole community, but as is so often the case with the trappings of privilege, the closer you look at where the defining line is, the more you fixate on the incremental differences that comprise it. Anyway, I always lobbied to go to a friend's house where the pool was firmly planted in the ground.
Caesar's Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, 1982.
© Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos.
Iraqi men and boys escape the heat with a swim at a pool in Baghdad, July 2011.
By Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
A pool designed by Alain Capeilleres in Le Brusc, France.
© Martine Franck/Magnum Photos.
My first and last infinity pool was in a hotel overlooking the Leblon beach in Rio. Infinity pools always seem to me like a silly gesture. A contained thing made to look wild. It was the same sense I had after campaigning to go to the water park as a kid—Water Country U.S.A.—and ended up in a wave pool. A contained thing made to move wild.
The last time I was in any swimming pool at all was 306 days ago, last August. During the day, it was a half moon of relief under 80 degrees of sun on the French Riviera. From a float, one could look out on the Mediterranean and spot where Roman Abramovich had parked his yacht. At night across the way, someone put on an elaborate fireworks show. It looked like synchronized swimmers in the sky, if the swimmers were controlled combustion in a pool of ink.
Swimmers look through underwater portholes in Las Vegas, 1955.
By Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
I had never been in a pool like that before and I expect to never be in one again. You only get there by knowing someone who knows someone who was friends with someone's brother who vacations in the South of France. Lightning strikes down a line of connections and suddenly you're in a place you never deserved to be. It's an E.M. Forster novel crossed with a Slim Aarons portrait. There, all the pools that came before this one seemed to be a training, an exercise in trading up brushes with wealth for the ever-nicer, ever-brighter, ever-better situated in star-kissed towns far away.
It seems near impossible to pry pools from status. But Joan Didion succeeded once, in an early essay called "Holy Water," she wrote, "a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye."
A match between Kazakhstan and Italy during Men's Water Polo at the 2017 FINA World Championships in Budapest, July 2017.
By Adam Pretty/Getty Images.
A pool in Budapest, 1980.
© Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos.
Children playing football in an empty swimming pool on a hill surrounding Kabul, Afghanistan, June 2006.
© Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos.
Los Angeles may have Didion to explain it away, but New York has Samantha Jones. "There's a pool a block from my apartment and I can't get in," she said in Season 6 of Sex and the City. "You have to be a member and I'm on some kind of bullshit wait list." A pool may be a modern salvo against the elements in the West, but in the East, what's free is crowded and what's private is expensive, and possibly also crowded. The pools tend to be on top of buildings, and the climb up is more than one kind of vertical. It's here in a New York heatwave, in a different sort of elemental scarcity, that all the pools you loved before revert to fodder for daydreams. And for better or for worse, you never forget the nicest pool you've ever been in.
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